Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is hard to do justice to this debate in only ten minutes. I welcome the debate, and wish to indicate that I will not oppose either the Fianna Fáil amendment or the originating proposal.

We have developed a very important service. Its aim has been to ensure that children with special educational needs fulfil their potential. We are now investing €1.8 billion in the support of children with special educational needs. The amount of investment has grown by 43% through the hard years since 2011. We have consistently expanded provision in this area, even through the most difficult times. This is not an optional extra in any sense, far from it. This is one area that has been exempted from cuts throughout successive Governments during the period of very real difficulty. Indeed, there has been an increase in support for children with special needs.

Compared with 2011, an additional 12,400 children now avail of the support of SNAs, an increase of 55%. The support those children receive is very important; it allows them to continue in education. I am in the Dáil long enough to remember a time when the Department of Education would fight court cases to deny children the benefits of an education of the sort we are now investing in so substantially. It represents a major improvement in our attitude and our values towards children with special needs.

It is important to remember that every child with a diagnosis and an identified need gets an SNA service. We are very conscious that there are long waiting lists for necessary services in many areas. Children are forced to wait and there is long duration between the identification of a need and being seen by a professional. That is not the case for SNAs. Furthermore, the decision to allocate an SNA to a child is decided upon by an independent body, the NCSE. There is also an independent appeals process, which has been underwritten by the Government. In my time as Minister for Education and Skills, we have delivered 1,000 additional SNAs each year to ensure we are meeting this growing need.

This year we have responded to one of the criticisms mentioned by Deputy Mattie McGrath, which was that there was an uncertainty as to whether SNAs would arrive at a school. The reason for that was that under the old procedure SNAs were not budgeted for in the Estimates. The NCSE would identify how many SNAs were required, but the Minister for Education had to go to the Minister for Finance and the Government to get a specific provision during the course of the year. For the first time ever, this has been built into the Estimates. Last year I made provision for 1,095 additional SNAs, and I was able to provide schools with individual allocations before the end of May. Applications are made in March, and the decisions are made and the schools informed in May. In addition, if during the course of the first term additional need is identified, we make an additional allocation in January.

We regard this as an extremely important area, but despite the substantial investment already made, we believe we can do better. That is the backdrop to the NCSE, at my request, carrying out an investigation into how this service can be improved. The recommendations made by the NCSE are worth considering. Deputy Harty has studied them, and I believe the recommendations made are really exciting. The proposals are for changes which are similar to the changes we made to the resource teaching model where, instead of requiring a diagnosis to be made, with provision following only after a diagnosis and the delay that becomes inevitable due to the need to find a psychologist to make a diagnosis, we are now proposing to front-load the allocation of SNAs to the school. This will ensure that, before a child arrives, a profile of the school has been created and the child can expect to get access to an SNA without necessarily having to produce a diagnosis ahead of time. That change, if implemented, will be a great relief to parents. It will constitute a shift from the current model and it will deal with many of the frustrations. It will also remove much of the administrative hassle some Deputies referred to, where school principals are having to submit forms, wait for applications and deal with large amounts of paperwork. If we go along with these proposals, which I believe are very solid, the allocation will be front-loaded into the school.

As a result of the changes proposed, there will also be more job security for special needs assistants. The Deputies have rightly pointed out that there is uncertainty about the position of an SNA because an SNA has traditionally been allocated to an individual child. When the child leaves the school, and if the school no longer has children with the profile of need, it loses the SNA because he or she is linked to the identified need. The SNA has a contract, but one which is linked to an identified need. Of course, a redundancy payment is made if the contract is terminated. In 2013, under the Haddington Road agreement, a supplementary panel was introduced, meaning that if an SNA lost a post in one school, he or she could go onto a panel and could then get first option for posts elsewhere. This was a significant improvement, which has dramatically reduced the number of SNAs who become redundant and cease to continue. High numbers of SNAs now continue on, even though their posts may change. If we move to the new model, it will provide far more job security because SNAs will be front-loaded into the school and will not be so closely linked to individual pupils. That will improve the system.

The other major proposal from the NCSE is that resources would be ring-fenced in areas of therapy that could dramatically broaden the scope of what can happen in a school. We have already piloted this idea for speech and language and occupational therapy in 75 schools and 75 pre-schools. At the moment, a child might meet a therapist once in nine or ten weeks and between visits nothing happens. In future, these schools will have the capacity, built into the school by speech and language therapists, to continue working between those episodes. Both the teacher and the SNA would continue to support the speech and language capability of the child between visits to the therapist. We believe this will have a much higher impact for our investment in speech and language therapy and a much better outcome for children. We have to test this idea in real life, so the pilot scheme has been set up involving 75 schools and 75 preschools in community health organisation, CHO, 7 of the HSE, in Wicklow, Kildare and parts of west Dublin. The idea is being tested.

We have to implement these proposals carefully. We learned from the resource teaching model, which was piloted in 47 schools. There was a proof of concept before we moved to provide the programme nationwide. That is very important. Deputy Harty has asked why we cannot act more quickly. It is very important that we build confidence in the model and demonstrate that it can work in order that we can go back to Government to seek support for such an approach.

We have to show what it will cost and what impacts it will deliver, get approval for a pilot and then move to implement it on a broader basis. I am convinced that this will result in a significant improvement in the way we do this. What the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, is saying does not just apply to speech and language and occupational therapy, but also to many areas in which children attending school need specialist support that cannot be delivered within the school. We will have regional teams that will provide such support and they will work to build the capacity of schools to handle more complex cases.

This is a significant breakthrough. In regard to ensuring that special needs assistants, SNAs, are properly treated, under the Haddington Road agreement, we carry out an annual review of the supplementary panel system. I meet the trade unions regularly and I attend the Fórsa annual trade union conference to listen to the affected staff. We also engage in consultations. For example, when the NCSE consulted the representatives of SNAs there was an SNA on the team. Special needs assistants are invaluable education stakeholders and we need to support them.

I welcome this debate because it contributes to work that we, as Members of the Oireachtas, will have to do over the coming years to build an even stronger model to support children with special needs. I am glad there is a fair degree of consensus in the House about the direction of travel.

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